Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Towards Holistic Smart Cities

Today’s Smart City
developments can be summarized as ‘representatives smart’, as opposed to
‘collective-smart’ – one of the terms we propose for describing the future
vision of cyber-human smart cities involving a rich and active interplay of
different stakeholders (primarily citizens, local businesses and authorities),
effectively transforming the currently passive stakeholders into active
ecosystem actors.

Realizing such complex
interplay requires a paradigm shift in how the physical infrastructure and
people will be integrated and how they will interact. At the heart of this
paradigm shift lies the merging of two technology and research domains –
Cyber-physical Systems and Socio-technical Systems – into the value-driven
context of a Smart City. The presented Smart City vision diverges from the
traditional, hierarchical relationship between the society and ICT, in which
the stakeholders are seen as passive users who exclusively capitalize on the
technological advancements. Rather, the architecture we propose puts value
generation at the top of the pyramid and relies on “city capital” to fuel the
generation of novel values and enhancement of traditional ones. This
effectively transforms the role and broadens the involvement and opportunities
of citizen-stakeholders, but also promotes the ICT from passive infrastructure
to an active participant shaping the ecosystem.

Architecture of Values: The fundamental idea
behind a collective-smart city is the inclusion of all its stakeholders
(authorities, businesses, citizens and organizations) in the active management
of the city. This includes not only the management of the city’s
infrastructure, but additionally the management of different societal and
business aspects of everyday life. The scale and complexity of managing
diverging individual stakeholder interests in the past was the principal reason
for adopting a centralized city management model where elected representatives
manage all aspects of the city’s life and development.

However, we believe
that recent technological advances will enable us to share the so-far
centralized decision-making and planning responsibilities directly with various
stakeholders, allowing faster and better-tailored responses of the city to
various stakeholder needs.

The key technological
enabler for this process is the active and wide-scale use and interleaving of
technologies and principles from the IoT and Social Computing domains in the
urban city domain. These technologies form the basic level of the proposed
architecture of values. They allow the city to interact bidirectionally with
the citizens in their everyday living, working and transport environments using
various IoT edge devices and sensors, but also to actively engage citizens and
other stakeholders to perform concrete tasks in the physical world, express
opinions and preferences, and make decisions. The “city” does not need to be an
active part in this interaction. It can serve as a trustworthy mediator
providing the physical and digital infrastructure and accepted coordination
mechanisms facilitating self-organization of citizens into transient, ad hoc
teams with common goals. This synergy, in turn, enables the creation of novel
societal and business values.

Infrastructural values – This category
includes and extends the benefits conventionally associated with the existing
notion of Smart City – those related to the optimized management of shared
(city-wide) infrastructure and resources. Traditionally, the management of such
resources (e.g., transportation network and signalization, internet
infrastructure, electricity grid) has been static and highly centralized. The
new vision of a Smart City relies on the interplay of humans and the
IoT-enabled infrastructure, enabling additional, dynamic, locally scoped
infrastructural optimizations and interventions, e.g., optimization of physical
and IT/digital infrastructure in domains such as computational resources,
traffic or building management. Apart from existing static/planned optimizations
(e.g., static synchronization of traffic lights), the dynamic optimizations of
the infrastructure might include temporary traffic light regime changes when a
car accident is detected.

Societal values – This novel value
category arises through the direct inclusion and empowerment of citizens as key
stakeholders of the city. The fact that through the use of incentivized/paid to
perform specific tasks in both the digital and physical environments is a
powerful concept bringing along a plethora of socially significant changes.

For example, while
most cities function as representative democracies, significant local changes
are often decided upon through direct democracy (referendums, initiatives).
While undeniably fair in principle, one of the biggest obstacles to more
frequent use of direct democracy is the under-informedness of voters. It has
been shown that informing the citizens enables them to make more judicial and
responsible decisions. The pervasiveness of IoT devices enables interaction
with citizens directly and opens up the possibility of informing the citizens
better, or even simulating in practice the outcomes of different election
choices.